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The practical application of the keyword search volume metric is quite obvious. We use it to determine how much organic search traffic our page will get if it ranks on the front page of Google for a given keyword.

The logic is very straightforward: the more people that search for a specific keyword in Google, the more traffic the top-ranking pages for that keyword will get.

And if the search query doesn’t get a lot of searches, then the traffic to the top ranking pages would also be low, right?

Well… No.

I’m sure every professional SEO has noticed that ranking a page for a high-volume keyword doesn’t always result in a huge amount of traffic. And the opposite is true, too—pages that rank for seemingly “unpopular” keywords can often exceed our traffic expectations.

The search volume in Google Adwords is a “rounded annual average,” which is not accurate by definition. A good example is the keyword “Christmas”—people don’t search for “Christmas” in July, so the “annual average” number applied to the month of July doesn’t make sense;

Google AdWords combines keywords for search volume. Try “seo” & “search engine optimisation”; they have the same search volume according to AdWords. In reality, the popularity of these search queries is obviously different;

Different keyword research tools update their search volume data (by pulling it from AdWords) with varying frequency. This is why the search volume for the same keywords will often vary;

There’s no consistency in regards to the search volume…even between Google’s own tools. Between Google Keyword Planner, GKP “Forecaster” & Google Search Console “Impressions”, all of them show different numbers for the same keywords.

In other words, the search volume number that you see in Google AdWords is quite different from the actual number of searches that are going to happen next month.

Which means that a traffic prediction based solely on the search volume alone cannot be accurate.

Reason 2: Google is “stealing” clicks from website owners

Back in the days of “ten blue links”, searchers couldn’t get an answer to their search query, unless they clicked on one of the links in the search results.

This is not the case anymore:

Google has a goal of providing the best possible user experience for searchers, which implies answering their question right away.

Hence the variety of “SERP features” that display information right in the search results, so that people won’t need to click through to any websites.

Well, in Google Adwords they don’t show you that. You only get the raw search volume of a keyword and you don’t know if searchers are actually clicking on the search results or not.

But here at Ahrefs, we don’t rely on Google Adwords data alone. We pair their search volume numbers with the data that we get from clickstream. This allows us to see if people are actually clicking on any of the search results, after performing a search.

According to our data, only 19% of searches result in clicks on the search results. And that “instant answer” on top of the search results (see my screenshot above) is the reason why people don’t click.

Luckily, that doesn’t happen with all search queries, because the vast majority of them cannot be answered this briefly. So there’s still a massive amount of search traffic that Google has to send to the actual websites.

But lately, Google seems to be showing the “people also ask” box for an increasing number of search queries—many of which are quite “uncommon”. This makes it harder and harder for regular search results to get clicks.

You can see that the “people also ask” box has started occurring for many of these terms over the past few months.

Reason 3: Advertisers are stealing clicks from SEOs

Technically, Google is not stealing clicks from you. They just make it so people don’t click anything at all, because they get the answer right away.

The ones who are actually stealing your clicks (almost literally) are advertisers.

And Google is helping them in every way they can:

There used to be three ads above the organic search results, now there are four.

The ads used to clearly stand out from the natural search results, so that searches could make a conscious decision as to whether they wanted to click on an Ad or a natural result. Now the Ads are almost indistinguishable from natural search results.

AdWords will not only show your ad for the search queries that you choose to advertise for, but it can also display your Ad on all sorts of closely related searches.

I created a great guide to keyword research, which consistently ranks #3 for “keyword research.” But it doesn’t get as many clicks as it deserves, because of the Ads.

According to Keywords Explorer, up to 46% of clicks will go to the paid search results:

And Google doesn’t shy away from advertising their own stuff in the search results.

What kind of Ad budget would allow you to compete with a multi-billion company, that also happens to own that Advertising platform?

And that is not some kind of rare case. If the keywords that you’re targeting have even the slightest commercial value, you can expect to see Ads. These will push organic results down, which makes people less likely to notice them.

Check out the dynamics of Ads across the keywords that I’m tracking via Rank Tracker:

Reason 4: The page rarely ranks for a single keyword alone

When doing keyword research, a lot of people tend to forget that there might be a ton of related searches to a query that they choose to pursue.

Back to our example of “who founded google” search query.

There are many other ways to ask this same question in Google:

“who created google”

“who started google”

“creator of google”

“who made google”

“google’s founders”

“who was the founder of google”

“the inventors of google”

Google is smart enough to understand that the meaning behind all these search queries is exactly the same. Which is why it shows nearly the same search results for all of them.

In fact, I created that list above, by looking at which keywords the #3 ranking page for “who founded google” also ranks for (using Site Explorer tool):

As you can see on the screenshot above, this page is ranking for 517 different search queries in the US alone. Each of these keywords might be bringing only a tiny bit of traffic, but it eventually adds up to a fairly decent number.

Another thing you might notice is that some of these search queries aren’t even closely related to the original one (i.e. “who founded google”). I’m talking about queries like “when did Google start” or “google company history”.

We have recently studied ~3 Million random search queries to find out how many keywords the top ranking pages would also rank for:

Turns out that an average #1 ranking page will also rank for about a thousand relevant search queries.

And even if your page doesn’t rank in top5 for your main (most popular) search query, you may still get decent search traffic, because it may very well rank in top5 for a few hundred secondary (less popular) queries.

Unfortunately, we didn’t study what influences the number of keywords that a page ranks for. But if I were to guess, I’d go with these three factors:

The topic itself — Some topics are super narrow, so the number of relevant search queries that your page could possibly rank for is very small. And some other topics may come with a huge “long tail” of relevant searches attached to them;

The content of a page — The more effort you put into expanding your topic with all possible detail, the more relevant searches your page will be able to attract;

The backlinks — This is still one of the strongest signals for Google that your page deserves to rank. If you’re frequently using Ahrefs’ SERP Checker feature, you might have already noticed that pages with more backlinks tend to rank for more keywords and generate more search traffic in total.

Let me expand a little bit on the first two.

Speaking of the topic

In the prequel to this post, I used a cool example to illustrate how a seemingly more popular topic can have a profoundly smaller total search traffic potential.

Which of these two topics do you think has a bigger search traffic potential?

The one with more search volume, right?

Nope, it’s the other one.

Let’s take the #1 ranking page for both of these search queries and see the total search traffic to each page via Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool:

It turns out that the topic that is roughly half as popular (according to it’s search volume) actually sends 10x more traffic in total.

The “SEO tips” page only ranks in Google for 148 search queries, while the “submit your website to search engines” page ranks for almost 4k search queries.

I highly recommend that you browse the keywords each of these pages ranks for (via Site Explorer) and you’ll see the difference between what I call “narrow topic” and “broad topic.”

Btw, we didn’t get scared by the KD80+ score of “submit website to search engines” and covered it at Ahrefs blog. We barely rank in top5 for that keyword as of today, but the total search traffic to that page keeps growing every month:

Speaking of the content

I’m sure that a lot of people who are reading this article right now are on the verge of stuffing their content with all possible variations of their main search query, with the aim of getting more search traffic.

I mean, how can you rank in Google for things that you don’t mention on your page, right?

One of such factors was the presence of the exact-match search query anywhere on the page.

Here’s what we saw:

According to our data, almost 75% of pages that rank in top10 for a given keyword don’t have even a single mention of that exact-match keyword anywhere on the page.

In other words, you don’t need to turn your content into a barely readable collection of all possible search queries around a certain topic.

That might have worked in 2005, but not in 2018.

What you need to do instead is:

Study your topicvery well, so that your page would include every detail that people might need to know;

Study the relevant search queries and make sure that your page covers most of the things that people are searching for in regards to that topic;

Study the top ranking pages and the keywords they rank for. This will help you to understand how deep you can go with covering that topic and which search queries you can hope to attract with your page.

Reason 5: The “hidden” long tail of search demand

I just told you about our “also rank for” study, where we determined that the average top-ranking page will also rank for nearly 1000 more relevant search queries. All because people ask the same question in all sorts of peculiar ways.

Well, that study was based on Ahrefs’ “database of search queries”. Which is (most likely) the biggest in the industry, but not nearly as big as the actual number of searches people put into Google.

For any commercial SEO tool (like Ahrefs), the costs of running such a monstrous keyword database can’t really be justified. Not to mention that there’s no way for any third parties to “catch” 100% of search queries that people put into Google every day.

This explains why the “Organic traffic” numbers that you see in Ahrefs are always smaller than you see in Google Analytics (sometimes vastly smaller):

We simply don’t know all the possible search queries that a page may rank for. Especially when nearly 20% of search queries that people search every month “have never been asked before”.

These ones are mostly examples of “broad topics,” where people don’t have a single common way to ask this question to Google.

It’s time to make adjustments to your keyword research

I did my best to illustrate that the search volume metric can be very deceiving if you look at it in isolation:

On one hand, you might get blinded by the high popularity of a keyword and overlook the fact that it doesn’t get any clicks.

On the other hand, you can discard hundreds of “unpopular” keywords, while the total search traffic potential was actually quite decent.

But not anymore!

We had to crunch a ton of data to come up with the numbers and insights that would persuade you to look beyond the raw search volume metric. And we’re hoping that this new knowledge will help you refine your keyword research and get better ROI out of your SEO efforts.